The NIH’s 15% Cost Cap Isn’t Strict Enough

In her Feb. 25 op-ed “A Compromise on University Funding,” Harvard Prof. Maya Sen recapitulates the mantra of many university administrators, deans and chancellors that indirect caps “imperil research.” This claim is dubious to some of us physician scientists who hold federal research grants.

For example, of my $3 million Defense Department clinical trial grant relating to spinal-cord injury, nearly 40% of these taxpayer funds won’t be spent on research. They will go to university and institutional administration “indirect” fees. At least in my clinical trial, none of these indirect fees will be spent on enrollment, consent, data collection, data analysis, investigator salaries or any other direct execution of research. They will be spent opaquely on compliance with “costly regulations” and the salaries of administrators who even Ms. Sen admits have multiplied to uncomfortable levels.